BlogsWeek.com

I’ve recently released BP Profile Search version 2.6 and then version 2.7 to address the compatibility issues with BuddyPress 1.5.

But… the Age Range feature is not working yet, because in BuddyPress 1.5 the datebox field values are stored as a date string, not as a timestamp.

I haven’t found a way to fix this yet, and I’ll welcome your ideas and help. Thanks!

I’ve recently had the chance to read the latest SilverStripe book:

SilverStripe 2.4 – Module Extension, Themes, and Widgets: Beginner’s Guide

I found this book very well written and entertaining. The author does a great job highlighting the SilverStripe way of building websites, and a good book explaining a good CMS is a very enjoyable read. But let’s see the book contents in more detail.

We start with the first thing new users may wish to learn, that is customizing the layout of our website. To make the journey in SilverStripe land more interesting, the author lets us build a complete project, a bar website.

To customize the site layout we learn to know the standard BlackCandy theme, and the Silverstripe template engine that allows us to build our own themes.

The following chapter explains the MVC structure of SilverStripe. MVC, meaning Model – View – Controller, is a popular software architecture that cleanly separates the presentation, the control logic and the database in a software application. Armed with this knowledge, we learn how to build our first SilverStripe page, using the View and the Controller layers.

Next we learn the Model, that is accessing the database for storing and retrieving information, and extending the model to suit the needs of our site.

SilverStripe is very extensible, if we add widgets and short codes. We learn how to use them, and how to build ours if necessary. Along the road we also learn how the SilverStripe cache works, and how to use it to improve our site performance.

Modules are more complex and powerful extensions for our SilverStripe site, and again we learn how to use available modules and how to build our own. The book lets us build an image gallery module for our bar website, and package that module so it could be distributed independently.

Many SilverStripe modules are already available, and among them we can find modules to add blog, forum and e-commerce functionality to our site.

But our site won’t reach its full potential if we don’t add interactivity, so we need SilverStripe forms. We learn how to create and display a form, and how to get and process the user input. We can also add automatic client-side validation, or custom client-side validation using the jQuery Validation plugin.

Last but not least, we learn how to localize and internationalize our project. Now we can go forth and build great websites with SilverStripe!

If you liked MODx Web Development, released by Packt on March 2009, you’ll also enjoy MODx Web Development – Second Edition, published on March 2011 and now available, see MODx Web Development – Second Edition.

This second edition offers a much needed update from MODx 0.9.6.1, covered in the first edition, to MODx Evolution 1.0.4.

The book is written for the novice MODx user, and offers a lot of screenshots, almost one per page. All these screenshots have been updated, and the new MODx terminology is now used (e.g. Documents are now Resources).

The book does not assume any prior knowledge of site development, and explains how to build a site with MODx using many step by step examples.

First come Resources and Containers (the basic elements of a MODx site) and templating (the way to style those elements according to our preferences and needs).

Then the author introduces the authentication and authorization of users, and explains Snippets, powerful tools to enhance our MODx site. Two important built-in snippets are presented: Ditto, which enables content aggregation (including tagging and feeds), and Wayfinder, which builds a variety of Resource lists, useful for instance to build navigation menus.

The final chapters are more interesting for advanced users: they discuss the PHx notation, ways to integrate forums or image galleries, and how to create snippets, plugins and modules.

Last but not least, a quick peek on the new MODx 2.0 is offered. We hope that will be the subject of the third book edition!

This new version is simply an update for BuddyPress 1.2.8 multisite installations.

Thanks to Gopherboy who reported this issue and suggested this update.

An important patch to BP Profile Search suggested by Gopherboy:

If you update WordPress to 3.1 and Buddypress to 1.2.8 and use multisite this will no longer work because Buddypress uses 3.1′s new network_admin dashboard. A quick change to line 30 of bps-main.php will fix this problem.

Find the following line:

add_action ('admin_menu', 'bps_add_pages', 20);

And replace it with this:

#add_action ('admin_menu', 'bps_add_pages', 20);
add_action (is_multisite()? 'network_admin_menu': 'admin_menu', 'bps_add_pages', 20);

This will allow the plugin to work with multisite enabled.